Someone told me about this book recently, and your thread prompted me to look it up on Wikipedia:
March (2005) is a novel by
Geraldine Brooks. It is a novel that retells
Louisa May Alcott's novel
Little Women from the point of view of Alcott's protagonists' absent father. Brooks has inserted the novel into the classic tale, revealing the events surrounding March's absence during the
American Civil War in 1862. The novel won the 2006
Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Plot summary
In 1862, Mr. March, an
abolitionist and
chaplain in the
Union Army, is driven by his conscience to leave his home and family in
Concord, Massachusetts, to participate in the war. During this time, March writes letters to his family, but he withholds the true extent of the brutality and injustices he witnesses on and off the
battlefields. He suffers from a prolonged illness stemming from poor conditions on a cotton farm in
Virginia. While in hospital, he has an unexpected meeting with Grace, an intelligent and literate black nurse whom he first met as a young woman staying in a large house where she was a slave. The recovering March, despite his guilt and grief over his survival when others have perished, returns home to his wife and Little Women, but he has been scarred by the events he has gone through. The novel accurately reflects
Bronson Alcott's principles, notably his belief that boys and girls of all races had a right to education and his wish to follow a
vegetarian diet. It presents the young Mrs March as a fiery character with strong verbal and physical expressions of anger.
The character of March is based in part on Alcott's father,
Amos Bronson Alcott, who was a teacher and abolitionist. Brooks used as source materials Mr. Alcott's letters and journals, and the writings of
Henry David Thoreau and
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who were friends of the Alcott family. Thoreau and Emerson also appear in the novel as secondary characters and friends of the Marches.
I had never heard of it, and it could provide an interesting counter-perspective.